Wednesday, December 25, 2013

That time Toronto built a giant bridge in record time

The
Leaside Viaduct doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves.
Needlessly dwarfed in terms of fame and stature by its slightly older
cousin to the south, the Prince Edward Viaduct, the Leaside bridge is
worthy of celebration all by itself.
The simple, utilitarian superstructure and basic concrete piers were
built in world record time using construction techniques never before
seen in Canada. It took barely 10 months to connect the top of Pape Ave.
with the burgeoning community of Leaside and its thrumming racetrack.
For comparison, the Bloor Viaduct, which was rewarded with an
official royal title and featured as the central location for the
popular novel In the Skin of a Lion, took almost five times as long to build.The
need for a second road bridge to span the Don Valley became apparent in
the late 1920s as the little neighbourhood of Leaside, a planned
community partially laid out to plans by Frederick Gage Todd for the
Canadian Northern Railway, was threatening to boom into a fully-fledged
town.
Leaside is named for John Lea, an early farm owner in the area.
"Leaside" was the name John's son, William, gave to a brick farmhouse he
built on the property, which was then acres of apple orchard and
pasture, in the 1850s. CNR entered the Leaside story in 1912 when
William Lea sold part of his property to allow for a rail right of way
an repair shops.
CNR upped the ante by promising an entire new model town for its
Leaside workers. Early plans called for a tidy collection of winding
residential streets and wider arterial avenues dotted with parks and
commercial strips. As Jamie Bradburn notes over at Torontoist, the town was designed to be home to at least 30,000 residents with an eye to being annexed by the City of Toronto.
Unfortunately, it didn't entirely go to plan. Leaside was built
partially to Todd's blueprint but the predicted population growth was
slow to materialize. In 1927, more than 15 years after its creation, the
Toronto Star was still predicting that Leaside would become
"in the near future a thriving town of 25,000 population, not the
product of a hysterical real estate boom, but the natural corollary of
civic development."
One of the issues holding Leaside back was its location. The town was
in a "condition of splendid isolation" on the far side of the Don
Valley, largely cut off from major roads. If the fledgling town was to
realize its potential, it needed a link to the outside world.Unlike
the Prince Edward Viaduct, the Leaside Viaduct didn't need a series of
referendums to gain final approval. A link to the rabidly popular
Thorncliffe Park Raceway, a mecca for thoroughbred and harness racing
and the spiritual home of the Prince of Wales Stakes, was enough, it
seems.
Construction began in earnest on Jan. 2, 1927, a few weeks after the
official groundbreaking on Dec. 13, 1926. The earth on the south side of
the valley was already frozen in an unyielding mass so a fire was
burned over the ceremonial first patch of sod, which was turned by East
York Reeve Robert Henry McGregor using a miniature silver shovel.
In the valley below, amid eight centimetres of snow, workmen were
laying the tracks for the temporary railway that would haul concrete and
metalwork for the new bridge. It was the first time a major
construction project had commenced in Toronto with snow on the ground,
and more in the forecast.The
construction schedule was ambitions. Designer and lead engineer Frank
Barber pledged to deliver the $150,000 concrete and steel structure,
substantially different to the one initially approved by the local
councils, within a year - an unprecedented timeframe.
Several new innovations made the goal achievable. Barber and his team
would measure the dry ingredients for the concrete supports by weight,
reducing waste, while the steel superstructure would be built between
the concrete piers without scaffolds or temporary supports, borrowing a
system used during construction of the Quebec Bridge.
Barber's teams worked 24 hours January to March through bitter cold,
wind, and snow. Massive searchlights on the valley floor bathed the
gigantic structure in brilliant light after dark. An average of 4 metres
of concrete was laid every four hours, Roger Miller and Sons, the
contractors, told the papers.The
extreme haste had consequences. Three men died while working on the
bridge, but Barber believed a few mishaps were to be expected. "This is
not an usual number because you cannot get a gang of several hundred men
working on a construction of such a size without an occasional accident
happening," he said.
With few setbacks (apart from the occasional low-profile personal
tragedy,) the Leaside Viaduct was complete by late October 1927, barely
10 months after the groundbreaking ceremony. The speed of construction
set a world record and the final bill came in slightly over budget at
$975,000 - about $13 million in today's money.The Star called 427-metre long structure "one of the
greatest links that has been forged for the development of the Queen
City and suburbs in the last score of years." Leaside and East York
decided to name the span, decorated with few architectural flourishes,
Confederation Viaduct. It was 60 years since the founding of Canada.
At exactly 3 p.m. on Oct. 29, 1927, William Donald Ross, Lieutenant
Governor of Ontario, cut the ribbon strung across the entrance to the
south side of the bridge using a pair of specially engraved scissors.
The band of the Mississauga Horse played God Save the King and a score
of dignitaries gave speeches.The
first vehicles to cross the concrete surface were a TTC bus, the first
on the new Pape route, and a bread wagon bound for Leaside. "The East
York-Leaside Viaduct changes the whole strategical position of Leaside,"
The Star wrote. "It centralizes the town and puts it on one of the most important highways in the metropolitan district of Toronto."
The deck was widened to support six lanes of vehicle traffic in 1969
as the city mulled extending Leslie St. south across the bridge. A major
facelift and heritage status arrived in 2004.
Like its cousin to the south, the height of the Leaside Viaduct has
made it a magnet for suicide since at least the 1930s. It lacks the
protection provided by the Luminous Veil on the Bloor Viaduct and as
Graeme Bayliss writes in his excellent and powerful story on the subject
in the Fall issue of Spacing, there are no plans to build a barrier.Please share this